I’ve been using a layout for the articles for a while; I thought I’d show what will go into the articles each week, from now on (not in any discernible order):
• Free Speech Board
• Macro Economics Class
• Economic Subject
• Short Book of the Week – Eventually this will just become book of the week
• Libertarian Movie of the Week – This will be a new feature where I examine a current or past movie that has libertarian leanings
• Quote of the Week
Free Speech Board
The question this week was, “What is the worst crime a person can commit?”
There were a bunch of heinous answers, like, “Download music illegally,” or, “Be a member of the Republican party,” along with some obvious ones including molestation, rape and murder.
My opinion?
I believe the worst crime that can be committed is to forcibly steal money from workers, under the penalty of imprisonment or death, and use that money to go half way around the world and murder civilians in a country the majority of the workers could not even point out on a map.
Then again, the State commits or has committed the most heinous crimes imaginable many more times than any one person has.
Macro
I got into a (very) minor scuffle with my Professor today (don’t worry it was all words), when he asked if anyone knew who Maynard was (he was talking about Keynes). Here’s how it went down:
Me – He was a dumb economist.
Prof – DUMB! You can’t get by in this class thinking that.
Me – You were talking about Keynes, right?
Prof – We won’t be talking about anyone dumb in this class. How can you say that? He was named one of the 6 most influential intellectuals of the last century.
Me – By who though?
Prof – Sigh…. Economists.
After that he went back to reviewing for our test. I have a number of points on this:
It’s possible (probable) that I should have held back on my amazingly quick wit, and said, “The guy whose theories prolonged the depression by twenty years,” or, “The guy whose every work was demolished by Austrians, mainly F.A. Hayek and Henry Hazlitt.” Unfortunately in my haste to be the first one to answer the question (in a class where I doubt anyone else had any idea what the hell was going on) I just said, ‘dumb.’
Keynes changed his mind basically every two years, F.A. Hayek destroyed his Treatise on Money to the point that Keynes agreed that it was wrong. Hazlitt wrote a line by line refutation of Keynes’ General Theory. Also, he misstated Say’s Law then proceeded to say it was wrong and base his whole theory on it.
Every single time Keynes’ theories have put into practice bad economic things have transpired.
Finally, Keynes may have had a high IQ or been intelligent in areas other than Economics, but economically he was a fool, and one who has caused many lives to be lost. Calling him a genius, or calling any other wrongheaded idiot a genius for that matter, just distracts from the fact that he was wrong and serves little or no benefit to anyone, what so ever.
Inclined to Liberty
Louis E. Carabini believes there are two types of people in the world: those who wish to live their lives on their own minding their own business and those who wish to rule over other people.
He’s shows in his book that those who say, “No one should be allowed to own a Yacht,” or “CEOs get paid way too much,” or “no one should be allowed to inherit wealth,” are in effect saying, “The government should not allow people to own a yacht,” “The government should not allow people to choose how and when they interact with each other,” and “The government should not allow people to choose how to allocate their wealth.”
Carabini applies this theory to many topics, in the book’s 35 chapters, but only 107 pages. The book can be read in probably an hour or two, but still leaves the reader with much more ammunition with which to fight the crazies than he had before.
Mall Cop
TJ and I ironically both saw Mall Cop on the same weekend, even though we live several states apart and did not communicate about seeing the movie.
The movie was surprisingly good, it stars Kevin James as mall security cop, Paul Blart.
Blart is still in the mall when a group of bad guys take it over and attempt to steal the ATM receipts from all of the stores. Though he is in no way a traditional action hero, Blart manages to use his own form of Guerilla warfare to take out all of the bad guys, except the leader.
At the end of the movie he catches up with the leader at an airport, as he is trying to leave, and it is shown that the S.W.A.T. team leader, who had been interfering with Blart (or at least attempting to) throughout the movie and was a bully to Blart during High School, is in with the bad guys.
It was extremely refreshing to see a movie that did not have the same cliché genius government cops and idiot criminals. When government has a monopoly on defense two things are always bound to happen:
1. Inefficiencies abound because the government has no profit/loss to calculate how and when to spend money. Because of this policemen are not paid what a market rate would be for the risk and skill involved in their profession, so many of them will need to get money on the side.
2. When a government troop goes bad, the only people who can stop him are other government troops. Everything and anything will be done to make the situation less embarrassing to the government.
Stimulus Bull
Robert Murphy has a great analogy for the stimulus:
If an allergic man is stung by a bee what should you do? Give him the freedom to go to the hospital and give him some a Benadryl or hold him down on the ground, don’t let him move, and take blood out of his leg and inject it into his arm?
The reason we are in a depression and have inflation above 16% is because government screwed around with the money supply in 2002. Right now the market needs to be free to go through a recession to get rid of all the mal investment made because of the false interest rates.
This is not what is happening, instead the government is propping up all the failing companies, the crappy companies that the market needs to kill and then redistributing money to try to ‘stimulate’ the economy.
At a time when more savings is desperately needed in a country with a negative savings rate, the government is taking the money away from those who save the most and redistributing it to those who will just spend it, thinking this will somehow help the economy.
God help us.
Quote of the Week
When the government fears the people, it is liberty. When the people fear the government, it is tyranny.
– Thomas Paine
Thomas Aquinas is the pseudonym of a free-market loving college student located in Salt Lake City, Utah.
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